`White Cow` Absorbing Account Of Irish Island The Island Of The White Cow: Memories Of An Irish Island. By Deborah Tall. Atheneum. $14.95.

Books

March 2, 1986|By Bonnie Gross, Special to the News/Sun-Sentinel

Deborah Tall did what most travelers to Ireland probably dream about -- living in one of those picturesque cottages on a rugged, remote island, writing poetry. The Island of the White Cow: Memories of an Irish Island is Tall`s account, written several years afterward, of her five years on an island of 230 people off the west coast of Ireland.

It is an entertaining and absorbing book, beautifully written and capturing all the Gaelic charm she came to love. If people gave gifts for St. Patrick`s Day, The Island of the White Cow would be a best seller.

The book is remarkable partly because this kind of thing is so hard to write. It could have been a travelogue; it could have been a poetic version of ``how I spent my summer vacation.``

Thankfully, Tall managed to avoid those pitfalls. She fell in love with her island, but she does not romanticize the life or the experience. Though she is a poet who wrote her first published volume of verse while on the island, she does not dwell on her poetry or the process of writing it. This is a book based on personal experience, but Tall manages to make herself just one of the interesting characters on the island, thus avoiding excessive self-absorption.

The book begins in 1972 when Tall, a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, sets off for the Island of the White Cow with her lover, a middle- aged Irish playwright. The lover, identified only as Owen, had been a visiting professor at Michigan. He had convinced Tall that to become a poet, she needed solitude and the time to write offered by the island life. Despite friends` surprise and family`s despair, Tall gives up the comforts of her middle-class suburban upbringing to do just that.

Tall eventually stays five years on the island, long enough to gain the insight of an insider who becomes a thread in the island`s fabric. She is invited to weddings and attends funerals. She faces the onslaught of summer tourists with the same mixed emotions as the islanders -- sorry to see them come, and then sorry to see them go.

At the same time, by virtue of her past, she remains an outsider with an outsider`s perspective. Tall goes to the pub every night to enjoy the drinking, singing and storytelling. That makes her an insider. Yet she was the first and, for much of the book, the only woman to do so. Pubs were still no place for a woman, and Tall`s presence there was tolerated by the islanders only because she was not one of them.

The author provides us a wonderful glimpse at island life. We see how she came to love the place: You can`t help admiring the islanders` generosity, independence and, at the same time, interdependence. Thanks to the skill of Tall`s writing, we can feel the melancholy, brooding atmosphere of the rocky, treeless landscape. And we come to know the island as a collection of individuals, whose stories are told with almost a novelist`s style.

Early on, for example, we meet Sean, a witty, friendly middle-aged bachelor whose Gaelic tales are a highlight at the pub each night. We see his friendship with Deborah and Owen develop, and we see his moods darken until, one night, he simply disappears. His body washes ashore later -- a suicide, no doubt, but mercifully not classified as one by the omnipresent Catholic Church.

It is a story like Sean`s that keeps Tall in touch with the reality of her island, a place so poor that virtually everyone is on ``the dole,`` where opportunities are so limited that people like Sean drift into alcoholism and melancholy or must leave the island to make a future.

Similarly, Tall honestly explores the irony of her very presence there. To most of the island women, America, the land of electricity and running water, not to mention television and automatic washing machines, is akin to heaven. And for good reason. Life is hard on the Island of the White Cow, perhaps hardest for women, and Tall describes the drudgery of it realistically.

Yet it is with sadness that Tall returns several years later to see ``progress`` come to the island. Running water is now taken for granted. Televisions, unknown during her stay, are everywhere, and Dallas has invaded the island psyche. It is ``a vanishing world,`` Tall concludes, and The Island of White Cow preserves a small corner of it.

If the book has a flaw, it is that when I finished, I wanted to know the long-term effect on Tall of her years with Owen on the island. Today, Tall is somebody else`s wife and the mother of a young daughter. She teaches middle- class American college kids in New York. Does she yearn to return someday? Does she keep in touch with island friends? How have her experiences affected her current perception of her middle-class life?

Tall doesn`t tell us, but it`s a small thing -- an indication, really, of how good this book is. When I finished reading it, I wanted her to tell me more.